Intensity Based Automatic Boundary Identification of Pectoral Muscle in Mammograms

The pectoral muscle detection is an important assignment to improve the diagnostic performance of the breast cancer detection. In this paper, we have proposed an intensity based approach for pectoral muscle boundary detection in mammograms. The enhancement filter mask of 3×2, have been proposed and applied on the image to enhance the pectoral region of the mammograms. The pectoral boundary points from the candidates were detected based on threshold technique. Finally, all the boundary points detected were connected to obtain the boundary of pectoral muscle. The proposed technique has been tested on 320 digitized mammograms form mini-Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database of 322 mammograms, with an acceptance rate of 96.56% from expert radiologists. The mean False Positive (FP) and False Negative (FN) rate demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.